We are "entitled", have a negative attitude?

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My point was simply many Aspies have this attitude that they are entitled to all of these accommodations at work and school, when really they are not. They should be thankful for whatever accommodations they get. They shouldn't go around demanding things like they are owed it.

Yes, this seems very common sense, but I have tried - believe me, I've tried so hard - to be positive, to be "normal", to be friendly and happy and upbeat and all that... and it can kinda/sorta work for a while, but clearly I don't know how to do this very well and people still sense something odd, and reject me sooner or later, usually sooner. And that is SO g*ddamn painful, and slams me down much lower than I would feel just being totally alone... I just don't know what to do anymore - d*mned if I do, d*amned if I don't is how I feel.

Thank you so much for posting - nice to hear from someone who totally sees it my way, and also excellent point about the "entitled" thing - I think there is some kind of class prejudice going on.

It's not my fault what family or socioeconomic class I was born into. People think I'm spoiled or "entitled" just because they can tell I came from an upper-middle class background? Who doesn't want to do as well as their parents? That's no crime. I wish I was born poor - at least then I would be used to being poor my whole life - there is nothing worse than downward mobility! As it is, my pain is that much greater, because it's that much harder for someone with my conditions (Asperger's/HFA, depression, anxiety, social phobia, extreme introversion, hearing loss, fatigue, etc.) to reproduce the standard of living I got used to as a kid.

I can understand that it's not easy, but I think don't worry so much about being 'normal' (it's difficult, especially if you try to sustain it and it takes too much effort and energy). Being yourself is probably more okay than you think (especially if you are around people who understand you, and it won't seem like you're forcing yourself to be someone else which might come off as unnatural). Also try not to worry too much about being rejected by other people - you don't really lose anything in this case and it could just mean you've happened to meet the wrong people.

Yes - I agree with you - this is not a society or a community - those are empty words. We live in a dog-eat-dog social Darwinian world, and it's getting worse, not better. I got better for a while, while the elites were afraid of communism - so they threw the 99.9% a few bones starting in the 1930s - 40 hour workweek, overtime pay, weekends off, unemployment insurance (of fairly limited duration), pensions (almost non-existent today)... they started eliminating these things already by the 1980s when they knew communism was defeated and they had no more fear of unions or people rising up an demanding a fair share of the pie. Today, if you're lucky enough to get the right genes and/or parents (let's face it - if you get one, you probably get both), you get EVERYTHING - people are born billionaires these days - and the rest of us get less and less. Bad for everyone in the lower 99.9%, but suicidally horrible for people with disabilities. There is a Nazi-like campaign by the right-wing media to slander all of us as "frauds" so they can do away with disability benefits and let us just die, or else brutalize us when we end up in jails or mental hospitals or homeless.

And yes, I really need to file a complaint... I just keep putting it off because I hate confrontation - I'm sure it stresses me out more than them - they probably just laugh - and I have almost zero confidence it will do me any good.

Please keep trying! It seems to be something of a lottery - but you definitely won't get them if you don't keep trying and appealing, etc. - it's an extremely frustrating process - designed that way to discourage people. They act like it's their money - it's really insufferable. Yet billionaire bankers have no problem borrowing TRILLIONS of dollars from the Fed to "pay back" their bailouts, and the biggest companies in the land get away with paying ZERO taxes on their multi-billion dollar profits some years... this system is so crooked and cruel it's sickening - I wish I didn't know all the stuff I've learned. I wish I could just be a kid again - I wish my parents were still alive and together, even though their marriage was a cold and terrible one... little did I know that those were the best days of my life????

Naturally, using bad things (in general, about the world, etc.) as an excuse to feel bad would be foolish.

I feel bad after trying to stay positive my whole life, but things only get worse and worse for me, for reasons beyond my control.

It isn't merely about the world, it's about my life, and what a hellish dead-end it seems to be.

Disability is a joke - it is so little and is given so stingily, to make you feel like you're taking something you don't deserve, etc., nobody would seek it unless they really, really needed it. Plus, in our society, being on disability is a mark of personal failure - because disability isn't really recognized - people don't think it can happen to them until it does - so they think it will never happen to them and that disabled people are to be looked down on as a drag on society, etc. The general attitude today really isn't far from the Nazi attitude that justified cramming "mental defectives and useless eaters" into vans and gassing them to death. So far our government takes a more passive approach - letting most people with disabilities just become homeless, or criminal, and then letting them die of neglect or prison brutality.

And the financial structures that support social services are not crumbling because of the people who need and use them. They are crumbling because the elites have been taking a bigger and bigger piece of the pie for over 40 years now, and they are deliberately cutting their own taxes and running up the deficit in order to justify slashing social services. This is still the richest country in the history of man - the way they are neglecting people with need is not just unconscionable and inexcusable - it is criminal.

Indeed it has - and not just for disabled people, but even for the elderly who have paid into the system their whole lives, only to be told that their pensions were "unfunded" and social security and medicare are "unsustainable", etc.

Just watch Fox News or listen to AM hate radio for a while - it'll turn your stomach. But I guess most people who watch/listen to those demagogues aren't intelligent or knowledgeable enough to understand what's really going on. They are easily manipulated through fear and anger - facts and reason never come into it. These guys are master manipulators - they make the Nazis' propaganda look crude and sophomoric.

Exactly! Meanwhile, Wall Street thugs get billions and trillions from their cronies in government - no problem there. Even the media is afraid to talk about that too strongly.

So true!

I agree, but even with well above average intelligence and 48 years on this earth, I cannot figure out how to do this. I feel like an abject failure, even though it's really not my fault.

You think making these accommodations for disabled people is unreasonable because our elites/government/media have conditioned us to think this way. The problem is that NOBODY wants to hire disabled people, so there is no "new job" to be found. These days even perfectly "normal" people can't find work - the unemployment rate is criminally high, and the blame goes to the elites - not to the victims. They have been off-shoring jobs and importing cheap illegal labor for decades precisely in order to screw the disabled, the unfortunate, the 'unproductive' (less productive, for no fault of their own) people.

A decent government would try to even the playing field by making it attractive for employers to hire disabled people and give them whatever accommodations they need. At the same time it would tax the hell out of those lucky enough to get all the right genes to be wildly successful in our society. Why do we punish bad luck with poverty and shame and reward good luck with billions and societal adulation?

I think "ignorant", "judgmental", and "hateful" might be even better terms!

In my experience, employers do NOT get in any trouble for this. In theory, there are laws against this, but they are just for show. This happened to me - my employer and the whole office made life hell for me, trying to get me to leave. My stress level was THROUGH THE ROOF the entire time I was there, but I tried to stick it out, because I didn't know what else to do - I figured any other job would be the same, and I at least wanted to get a year or so in before looking for another job. Well, as it turns out, just as I was about to explode from stress, I got injured on the job and simply could not continue doing that job. Unfortunately for me (again!), the injury was of the invisible variety, and easy for the system to deny. I asked my employer to please let me have another position that I could do despite my injury and disabilities, but to no avail. They fired me by sending me a letter saying "we accept your resignation". I quickly found out that no employment law attorney would take my "wrongful termination" case, because they all only represent the corporate side, not the worker's side.

As for the Americans with Disabilities Act? I think that's also totally for show - how would I be able to prove that they fired me because of my disabilities? How would I even prove that they fired me when they sent that letter saying they "accept my resignation"?

I really, really tried my best at that job - my utmost. And supposedly I was performing the job well, but at tremendous stress to myself (the job seemed to be a breeze for most others). And after being mistreated like that (ostracized, fired, treated like a fraud, etc.) I tried my utmost to get some justice. All to no avail. All I did was further stress myself out. The system is unbelievably harsh and cruel.

Sure, I'd prefer that too! And I did, as long as I was comfortably sheltered by family. Once my parents died and I found out how harsh and cruel the world is and that I could not support myself no matter how hard I tried.... that's when I became unrelentingly negative. And it's not that I feel "entitled to have a negative attitude" - I just don't know how I can be positive anymore given my current reality and apparently very bleak future.

You are SO right!